Poems

Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work

Days are unusual. The owl sends
out 5 zeroes from the pines
plus one small silver nothing. Where
do they float? Maybe out to
sea, where jellyfish are aging left
& right. They have some nerve.
Today, no new wars, probably. No
big button. The owl could be
your scholar of trapped light or
Walter Benjamin who writes a storm
blows in from paradise. Thinking through
these things each week, you cross
the bridge: gold coils, fog, feelings…
syllables also can grow younger like
those jellyfish. You bring your quilt
of questions in the car. At
work, you’ll have to be patient
at the risky enterprise of talking
to other people; so little progress
in this since the Pleistocene. Mostly,
though, you’re calm when traveling: silver
nothing, moving right & left; day
releasing the caged stars; one thought
mixed with no-thought, packed with light…
for MK

Brenda Hillman is the author of ten poetry collections, includingExtra Hidden Life, among the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2012 and currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

About This Poem

“I’ve been working on and off for about a decade with a procedural form inspired by a Jena Osman essay; the form is six words per line, twenty-four lines. (I try to be strict but sometimes give or take a word or two and consider hyphenated words to be one.) I have used it for some ecopoetic pieces and also for pieces about odd emotions. The challenge is to put a lot of existence in a short space, which is what interests me in poetry in general. This poem originated at dawn when I heard an owl in a Berkeley treetop; I was thinking about the commute of a friend who has to do a lot of work in the public sphere. I often think about non-human energy and life that goes in and out of consciousness simultaneously with historical events. The poem also refers to Walter Benjamin’s ideas about history as well as a sense that thought and light are both something and nothing.”—Brenda Hillman

More by Brenda Hillman

A left margin watches the sea floor approach
It takes 30 million years
It is the first lover
More saints for Augustine's mother
A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trial free of some sand
A left margin watches the watcher from Dover
After the twentieth century these cliffs
Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads
A dream had come right over
With a sort of severe leakage
Ah love let us be true to one another
Went down to the ferris wheel
God's Rolodex
There were neon spikes around everyone
Like the Virgin's spikes
Old punk's mohawk Evidence of inner fire
Rode throwing words off Red current Light swearing
Ah love The century
Had become a little drippy at the end
We're still growing but the stitches hurt Let us be
True to one another for the world
Easy on the myths now
Make it up Sleep well

Infinity lifted:
a gasp of emeralds.
I thought I felt
the tall night trees
between them,
no exactitude,
a wait not even
known yet.
I held my violet up;
no smell.
It made a signal squeak
inside, bats,
lisps of pride;
ah, their little things,
their breath: lungs of a painting,
they swept me
in four ways, their square
plans, as I have made
a good square saying,
you I
you not-I
not-you I
not-you not-I,
ritual of hope
whose weight
has not been measured—

Related Poems

I have an hour to read marcabru and fall in loveto study the medicines and put a rock in each corner of the houseand pray over it with pollen as my elder advisedto test my extraordinary knowledgesesto briefly wonder whether I was actually under a spellto write my poem about being a mongrelI must love even the fox that impedes my pathn jettison my former ire n any gesture toward abstractionn go to the dump finally w/ the disused bicycle tires and the broken antlers and the cracked stained glass of a ship that formerly I wdve harbored because I did not love myselfbut the broken shelfI want namore of itthe jangle-mongrel and the rose and the ndn cowboy that layall closetedalong w/ my availability to my own mind and the killings of our familyes queer and black and brown and ndnslaughter at orlando symbol of our hermitudemassacre at aravaipa gashdla’á cho o’aa big sycamore standing therebear river sand creek tulsa rosewoodn when I finally sussed them outn laid the tequila in its proper trashn attempted to corral the pony of my mindthey say the ohlone were here as ifthere were no more ohloneerected a fake shellmound called it shellmound avenuemy friends dont like thatmy friends dont like that excrementit’s not like youd give away the algorithm, my bf pointed out,to the one yr tryin to put a spell onmarcabru uses the word ‘mestissa’ to describe the shepherdess his dickish narrator is poorly courtingwhich paden translates ‘half-breed’ and pound ‘low-born’ and snodgrass ‘lassie’ but I want to say mongrel, mestiza, mixedbreedmelissima most honeyed most songfulwhat catullus called his boyfriend’s eyeshoney the color my dead dog’s eyes the stomach of the beeI’m going to gather pollen from the cattails in a week or twoto pray to the plant tell it I’m only taking what I needuse a coathanger to hook the ones far from shorefilter it thru chiffon four timeswhat is lovebut a constellation of significanceslyke-like magiclos cavecs nos aüra as the owl augursone gapes at a paintingthe other waits for mahana